Glamis Castle Presents: Shadow in the Crypt
Design
Narrative
UI Implimentation
Production
Research
Overview
A project made in collaboration with the staff at Glamis castle, this was made to promote the castle to young people. Made with a team of 4 artists, 1 programmer and me as the sole designer, I had to be careful when designing to account for the team makeup. I took a leadership role on this project. Additionally, I worked on the UI programming.
Process
A project made in collaberation with the staff at Glamis castle, this was made to promote the castle to young people. Made with a team of 4 artists, 1 programer and me as the sole deisgner, I had to be careful when desiging to account for the team makeup. I took a leadership role on this project. In addition to
Research
The rough process we followed was to have a read through the brief, and do some initial research, before meeting with the client. At this point we were able to get a clearer idea of what they were searching for. It was at this time we proposed an adventure game reminiscent of old point and clicks could work, but we were still remaining open to change. Next up was more research, a site visit and the start of design. Story and Puzzles were worked on simultaneously, in order to get work out fast so the artists could get working. These designs were then iterated and in game dialogue and text were written. The last thing to get started on my end was the UI implimentation, as I received this task later on.
Puzzle Design
The puzzles were developed alongside the story. They were a key element to the game, so were imperative to get right. They were an interesting challenge. This involved being able to match them to the narrative and be an entity in their own right. In the end there were 3 main puzzle threads. I enjoyed the challenge of making these interconnect.
I started off by identifying the rooms we wanted to use, somewhere visitors would instantly recognise, then mapped them out on a grid referencing the photometric walkthrough the castle has. I then broke down the main beats and puzzles, then designed them, and made sure they worked. This as then added into the maps, one version per puzzle thread, one for the dialogue and one combined.
This was helpful for later development as well as letting me check the balance both in terms of location and timings.
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Paper Prototype
These puzzles were tested via paper prototpye to ensure they could be followed and completed before development got to far. It was also a useful tool to ensure the design could be followed by the programmer.
Narrative Design
The first narrative task I undertook was to break down the major story beats and make character diamonds, along with figuring out our rules for ghosts. The characters were important to get down early, as this would allow our artists to quickly get started on the drawing and animating. As these were based on real people, key research was undertaken to understand who they were.
This in hand, I worked on the story beats. I knew we would only be doing the very first section of this game, so this is were I focused most my energy. I knew roughly where the story would be going, and I knew the main themes, this was all I needed for anything beyond the first 2 rooms, chosen to stay within scope.
I think my biggest regret with the narrative was leaving the dialogue until later, I would have liked to make another pass on it. The dialogue was interesting however. As we had one programmer, and we wished to remove some of the burden form him, we chose to use Twine to plan and create the dialogue. This is an open source branching story creator. We used this with out own tagging system for game specific tags, such as item, characters and emotional states. This was then saved to a .json file for his program to parse and implement, updated simply by replacing the file. This was a collaborative effort to create.
UI
Since the programmer was overworked and I had experience in Unreal, I agreed to take on all the work for the UI, beyond design.
This was more challenging than I expected. I initially came up with an idea to keep everything as diegetic as possible, the inventory being cards and your journal is given to you by a character in the game. This is to not ever remove the player from the gameplay. It also means the UI is less straightforward and I needed to brush up on my Unreal UI skills. I needed to remember more than I thought.
Production
I unintentionally got production experience on this project. We had no dedicated producer, and as I have a mind for documentation I somewhat naturally fell into the role. I am also liable to speak up in group sessions, therefore found myself pushing conversations along. This lead to a group decision that I would act as a semi producer. Becuase of this I did most of the communication with the lecturer and client.
Having now worked with a proper producer, my biggest regret in this role was to not set harder deadlines and ensure people were sticking with them.